Climbers in Chile's Andes say they have found the wreckage of a missing plane that disappeared more than half a century ago with a team of soccer stars on board.

Images of the twisted wreck of the LAN Chile Douglas DC-3 that went down on April 3, 1961, were shown on Chilean television on Sunday, released by the climbers who said the find was in Maule, about 300 kilometers south of Santiago.

"The plane is more than 3,200 meters up the mountain. Quite a bit of the fuselage is still there, a lot of things scattered over the area including human bones. So this story is getting a rewrite since this is not where original accounts said," one of the mountaineers, Leonardo Albornoz, said.